One of the true joys of RV travel after retirement is that you can go off route on a whim. Our normal route to visit our daughter in AZ was from the Orange Grove RV park (Bakersfield, CA) to the Elks lodge in Needles, CA. The night before setting out on this leg, I was looking at a map and noticed the town of Zzyzx.
Hey Babe, want to visit Zzyzx?
WTF is Zzyzx?
I have no idea.
Can be boon dock there?
No idea, but it is on the route to Search Light, NV.
What is in Search Light?
Casino!
Whoo Hoo.
Next day we diverted north from our planned route and found the exit to Zzyzx a few hours later. Road soon turned to dirt with water from a nearby winter lake flowing up to and over it complete with a high water, proceed at your own risk sign. We soon came upon a muscle car that was coming out of the area. Asked the driver how the road was ahead, and he said he gave up on it a mile or so ahead fearing the loss of his vintage, gas guzzling POS. After a bit of discussion, Judy I opted to go ahead as we had named our trailer “Boldly Go” for a fucking good reason. Judy was reluctant but agreed as there was no place to turn around on solid ground. Turned out the muscle car driver was just another chicken shit Californian, as we had no trouble making it the rest of the way to the “town”.
There are many strange names for towns in the US. King of Prussia and Intercourse, PA come to mind, not to mention French Lick, IN, Bowlegs, OK, and Flippen, AK. Been to the latter. Saw the Flippen post office, the Flippen Police Depart, the Flippen Christ of Christ, and we camped across the street from the Flippen Airport. But Zzyzx? Who and why would anyone in this wild world of sports name a town with three Zs, and X and a Y. Aliens? Or maybe it was settled by some lost tribe of Israel whose language has been lost to history. Mormons?
Turns out the original name was Soda Springs. Boring. It was a stop for Indians (with a feather not a dot) who were looking for water. I am sure that these natives did not call it Soda Springs, but as my wife and I having lived in Oregon and Washington for our entire lives, we really tired of trying to pronounce Native American names. Puyallup, Humptulips, and Yachats come to mind. Soda Springs eventually became an outpost for the US Army in 1860, so that the natives would be made to suffer from dehydration. Later there were miners and a railroad. Why? I do not know this, but that is what Wikipedia says so you know it must be true.
The name changed to Zzyzx happened in 1944. A popular radio evangelist, named Cultis Howe Springer, filed mining claims for 12,800 acres. His intention was never to mine shit. He intended to bilk Christian idiots into making him a millionaire. Soda Springs became Zzyzx mineral springs and health resort. Zzyzx was to be and still is the last word in the English language for health and larceny. He made big bucks in snake oil sales, sending his worthless shit all over the planet with promises to cure cancer, memory loss (opps, sorry that was Prevagin), and ED (opps, sorry that was Nugenix). Prevagin, “who would have thought that Jelly Fish would improve your brain function”, nope they don’t, because jelly fish have no brains! Springer touted the benefits of the natural hot springs, even though they were heated from a secret boiler. “Back aches and bad knees are a thing of the past” (opps, sorry, that was Chiropractor quackery). Springer planted palm trees to enhance the oasis concept. He added a hotel an air strip and a radio station where he could broadcast his lunacy to the masses.
This insane Christian quackery went on for three decades till the US government realized that this evangelical conman had no legal claim to the land. He was eventually tried and found guilty of fraud. He was jailed for a bit and eventually died in 1985. Justice was served in those days, unlike today where he would have been elected to Congress from a red state. The “town” is now part of the U. of California as a desert studies center. Surprisingly, Springer inadvertently left a redeeming legacy. He populated the oasis lagoon with Mohave tui chubs, which went extinct everywhere else. Even fucktards can occasionally and unconsciously do the right thing.
After a few hours of wandering the site, we drove on to Search Light in the dark. That is where my dog refined the rules of “fetch…fuck you” but that is another story.